We always hear that Hollywood is out of ideas, that the same old stories and screenplays get recycled, that the studios dive into the creative wasteland of old sitcoms to remake a mediocre show into an even more mediocre movie.
However, it seems now that even the branding and packaging for movies have fallen victim to this trend. A recent string of movies have been using the same creative look. And some of these movies started out with a different style altogether, only to switch to this generic feel upon their theatrical release. It seems the trend started with Dodgeball, a movie many found amusing, and which did extremely well, considering it was rumored to have been sitting on the shelf for two years before release.
Here is the movie poster from Dodgeball:
Red thick letters, on white, gray and black used for other text. Simple enough.
Then came along Beautyshop, featuring the delightful Queen Latifah. The original creative for this movie, designed back in 2004, months before it's release, looked like this:
Note the "In Theatres 2005" text, indicating this was an older look. This looks resembles the text and colors used for Barbie.
Then, a few months later, a release date was selected.
The text is now similar to Dodgeball, but the teal and pink color scheme remained. But by the time it hit the theatres:
Ends up looking just like Dodgeball.
Then comes the remake of the Honeymooners. A remake of the classic TV series, the branding reflected to look from the show. Again, note the 'In Theatres 2005' text:
The same moon graphic and everything. But by the time it made it to theatres:
Red thick letters, on white, same as the others. Now, one of the stars of Dodgeball, Vince Vaughn, is returning to the screen, with the freaky Owen Wilson, in Wedding Crashers. The poster:
I don't get it. And just about all of these are from different studios. This post doesn't really have much of a theory, because for the life of me, I can't imagine any reason this would be intentional, but then again, it seems too frequent to be chance.
At least there seems to be some hope on the horizon. Martin Lawrence's new movie, Rebound, is coming out this month. And the branding is DRASTICALLY different.
They used blue.
